A Nazi judge did the right things for wrong reasons; 4-June-2015

The Nazis in charge of concentration camps did a lot of immoral things. Third Reich, however, was a different and difficult time; discussing morality of this period is not a simple classification of acts into moral and immoral. A Nazi judge – Konrad Morgen – was the first person to prosecute commandants of the Nazi concentration camps. He himself was a German officer and prosecuted his fellow officers not for mass murders but for being involved in corruption. The judge reasoned that he couldn’t prosecute officers for what was legal – exterminating Jews; however, he could prosecute them for what Hitler also considered illegal: using the prisoners’ belongings or rations and selling these to fill the officials’ own pockets. So the officials did get prosecuted not for the greater and more heinous crimes they committed but often for petty ones.